“I hope it’s over quickly,” Karen said.
“I hope so too. Let’s go back in and send out the SOS—suppose we beam it five times a day until we get response—and then start exploring a little. I’d like to know just where the aliens are.”
“Underground, maybe,” Karen suggested. “Or in a domed city hidden somewhere in those awful mountains.”
“That’s probably it,” I said, nodding.
We returned to the ship and started the message on its way, announcing that we had discovered Lanargon accidentally, had landed, and would remain here acting as a signal-beacon until contacted by a member of the Multiworld Federation.
I snapped off the transmitter when we were through. “That should do it,” I said. “Now we’ll just have to wait, and keep sending it, and wait some more. One of these days we’ll get a reply, and we’ll tell them exactly how to go about getting to Lanargon and blasting it out of the skies. Then our job’s done.”
Karen frowned. “What if the aliens discover what we’re doing, and set out to find us?”
“No use thinking about it, honey. We’ll just have to sit here quietly and hope we’re not noticed by the wrong people. It won’t be fun, but what else can we do?”
“It’s like sitting on the rim of a live volcano,” Karen said. “And taking bets on when the top will blow off.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go outside and do some exploring. For all we know, we’ve landed right next door to an alien city.”
I stood up and led the way. I knew some exercise would loosen her tight-stretched nerves a little.
I stared for a moment at the dreary stretch of slag and needle-edged rocks. “You go to the left,” I said. “I’ll go the other way, and we’ll see what this place looks like.”
“Sounds good enough,” Karen said. She started to move off toward the towering mountain that looked down at the ship from the left, while I made my way over the heaps of rock to the cliff at the right.
I kept up a running conversation with her over the suitphones as we went.
“How’s it look from there?” I asked.
“Pretty much the same,” she said. “There’s a long plain, and then this mountain. Twenty-five, thirty thousand feet high, I’d say. I can’t see the top of it.”
“Nice,” I said. “Things are dull here. The cliff looks down on a valley, and there’s a sign of something that might have been a river once, before Lanargon tore loose from its sun. But there’s no sign of life anywhere.”
“Do you think this might be the wrong place? Some other dark planet that no one knows about?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, as I scaled up a jagged precipice and heaved myself onto a small plateau. “They’re probably all on the other side of this planet. It’s a big place, you know. I’m sure that—”
I stopped, chilled, and whirled at the sound of the terrible scream that ripped through my suitphones at that moment. I paused, not knowing in which direction I should run, and then, as Karen’s scream burst forth again, I began to race wildly through the twisting outcrops toward her.
“Mike! Mike! They’re here!”
“I’m coming,” I told her, and kept on running. A moment later, the ship came into sight, and I passed it and headed in the direction Karen had taken. It led through a dropping path into the plain that approached the mountain, and I dashed out toward her.
I saw her a moment later. She was standing on the top of a rock outcrop about ten feet high, kicking savagely at ten or twelve space-suited figures who were attempting to climb up and reach her. We had found the planet—but its inhabitants had gotten to us first.
I leaped forward and shouted my encouragement as I came. The next minute, I was at the base of the plateau, piling into the gang of aliens. They were husky, sturdy creatures, humanoid in shape, clad in dark spacesuits that made them almost invisible in the faint starlight.
I dragged one of them away from the path leading to the top of the plateau and crashed my gloved fist into his stomach. He bounded back without showing that the blow had hurt him, and made a signal to the others.
Immediately they split into two groups, working with calm, cold efficiency. Five or six of them continued to try to reach Karen, and the rest turned on me. I found myself surrounded by half a dozen aliens.
I struck out at the first one and saw him go reeling into the arms of one of his comrades, but then another hit me a stunning blow from behind. I staggered forward, felt another fist drive into my stomach. The flexible material of my suit yielded, and I gasped for breath.
Pulling away, I caught one alien by the arm and swung him down, but two more hit me at once. A gloved hand bashed into the yielding plastic of my face mask, and I went flying down on my back. I felt someone pommeling me viciously for a few moments, and then I stopped feeling anything.
When I awoke, Karen and the ship and the aliens were gone, and I was alone on the plain, sprawled out with my arms wrapped fondly around a small boulder that I had been using as a pillow.
The aliens had seen us, had come, had taken Karen, and had left for—where? What had they done with Karen? I hurled the questions at myself, angry for having allowed us to separate even for the moment.
I picked myself up, and took a few unsteady trial steps. I ached all over from my beating, but I managed to shake off the dizziness and keep on going. I had to find Karen, wherever she was, get her back to Earth somehow. I didn’t know how I was going to do it.
Lanargon was a big planet. There was no light to guide me. And the ship was gone.
Evidently they had left me for dead and taken Karen and the ship back to wherever it was they had come from. I started walking, not knowing and not caring which direction I might be heading in, simply putting one foot after another in the blind energy of complete despair. I headed down the long sweeping plain, walking nowhere on this world of perpetual nightfall, a dull pain throbbing all over my body.
I don’t have any idea how long I walked before the light appeared. All I know is I had been marching mechanically without so much as noticing where I was going, moving up one outcrop and down the next—and then, I became conscious of a glimmer of light in the distance. It was faint, but impossible to mistake against the inky Lanargon bleakness.
Suddenly I returned to life. I started to trot animatedly toward the source of light, hoping wildly it might be a signal beam of some sort sent up by Karen. As I drew near, though, I discovered what it was.
It was a small party of aliens, gathered together at the edge of a sprawling range of low-lying hills. There were about five of them, and in their midst was a portable generator which threw off just enough light to illuminate their camp. I guessed that they were another party out searching for us who were not aware that the other group had already achieved its mission.
I approached them in a wide semi-circle, swinging around from the left so I would be above them on the foothills. I could see now that they had a small vehicle of some sort, and that they were dismantling their camp and loading the equipment they had with them into the vehicle. I revised my earlier guess; this was a search-party who knew that the quarry had been snared, and which was preparing to return to home base.
I drew closer to them, close enough now to see that they were nearing the end of their task. I would have to move quickly.
I made my way down the side of the hill, deciding which one of the aliens was to be my victim. By the time I was on the plain, I had my man. He was busy about a hundred feet away, dismantling a wireless transmitter of some sort. The groundcar cut him off from the other four neatly. But I had to get him the first time; any struggle and I’d find myself fighting off all five of them within an instant.